Aside from having a good grasp of all luxor mechanics and well-trained accuracy, there are a few things to keep in mind when running this game:

• making a mistake, like firing a wrong-colored sphere between two that are already matching, costs you more time than it would to take a second and reconsider what you're about to do, ideally the higher your accuracy the faster you'll clear the levels
• Higher difficulty levels are slower because you get more colors to deal with throughout the run (not to mention there's a higher risk of losing a level). However, medium has a small potential to be faster then Easy because of Color Sort in lategame.
• activating Bonus Levels WILL lose you a lot of time, and you absolutely don't need the points, therefore, suppressing the reflex to destroy all the jars whenever they appear is really important (and surprisingly difficult)
• skip all the puzzle levels - [UPDATE] - the fastest way to lose a puzzle level is to shoot a sphere off-screen, the moment it leaves it you get the "level failed" prompt
• score is IRRELEVANT to your run; in theory, getting as few rank ups as possible is preferable because every prompt that you were promoted loses you like 2s, so feel free to ignore any gems that are falling
• try to catch all the Ankh coins, you'll need them to upgrade your powerups
• Early Survival Levels are good for farming coins for upgrades, since you can't clear them any faster than the time limit you can play around and try to set up 5+ long lines; ideally you don't want to have no more than 2/4 canopic jars at the beginning of a survival level, so that you can destroy the 3rd one there and then make profit of "endlessly" spawning golden scarabs (more coins = more coins) without risking a bonus level
• Onslaught Levels - my strat involves forcing all the statues to spawn on the left side of the screen, giving me as much free space on the right side
• Crossing the River - your reload speed is slower than usual, keep that in mind; a LOT of time can be saved on these levels if you're lucky, probably the only gamemode where Reverse is useful
• Mirrors - the floating boots or whatever that appear on some levels might seem useless if you play the game casually, but on certain levels they can be a lifesaver, helping you reach spheres in unfavorable spots, knowing how to use them is an important skill
• Upgrades and Powerups - the most useful powerups for clearing levels quickly are Fireball, Scorpion, Color Cloud and Lightning Bolt. IF you are a skilled player already, Speed Shot will be the ultimate and most important tool for clearing levels. In general, you should prirotize these 5 power ups mentioned above, but if you want to know more please refer to my extended power up guide.

[NEW]

• "RNG Manipulation" or: forcing a specific type of power ups (there's no official name) - it's a technique that's very recent to me, I only know about it because of alex's vague post in his Luxor QoTA "guide" Basically, whenever you get combo x3, the third shot will drop you a powerup in the color of the sphere that caused the combo x3. Maybe it'll be easier to understand with an example, you shoot a yellow into 2 yellows, they blow up; then you immediately shoot a black into two blacks, they blow up, that's combo x2. Then you get white, you shoot it into 2 or more whites and you get combo x3. There's a 100% chance that the powerup will be either color cloud or color swap because these two are white tier power ups. You can use this technique to get more favorable for clearing powerups, more about colors of powerups and their usefullness in my extended powerup guide, however, most of the colors are pretty obvious. It's also important to not how combo works: you need to have consecutive matches with SINGLE shots, so if you shoot something into a single sphere (i.e. they don't blow up) your combo resets, so you want to set up a few spots with (at least) 2 spheres first and then take them out one by one to get more power ups.